Ghost Country Read Online Free PDF Page A

wasn’t actually old; Bethany was just navigating the no-frills backwaters that ordinary users never saw.
    “Will the pilots see this on their screens?” Travis said.
    “Nobody will see. Not even the satellite vendors.”
    She typed a command string that looked like random letters and numbers to Travis, and executed it. An hourglass icon appeared for a second, and then the little screen filled with a street map of the United States, overlaid on a satellite image. The satellite layer was fractured into several distorted squares, overlapping one another to make a composite. Travis realized what he was looking at: not the static view of the world that was available on any number of websites, but a realtime image composed of multiple live satellite feeds. Most of the visible United States was still deep in the shadow of night.
    Bethany used the phone’s arrow buttons to center the map on Washington, D.C., and zoomed in until the city filled the frame. Even in that narrow field of view Travis could see a margin where coverage from different satellites overlapped. The margin was moving, just perceptibly, a pixel’s width every few seconds. He envisioned recon satellites skimming over the Earth in low orbit, their fields of view always moving relative to the ground.
    Bethany zoomed in one step further. More detail of the city emerged. Travis saw the long green belt of the National Mall running left to right across the middle of the image. Just above it was the focal point that several major streets converged toward: the White House. A mile northeast of that, an area of about three by three blocks was highlighted in bright yellow. Bethany tapped that part of the screen.
    “Still there,” she said. “The survivors have been somewhere in that rectangle since I first checked around two in the morning. They must have been moved right after the attack, which would’ve happened further south, between the White House and Andrews. The fact that I’m getting a signal means at least one of them is still alive.” She thought about it and added, “Or at least their blood hasn’t congealed yet.”
    Travis waited for her to explain.
    “They have a radioisotope in their bloodstreams,” she said. “Iodine–124 doped with a signature molecule. Harmless levels of it are in the water supply in Border Town, and it stays in the body for about twenty-four hours after last ingestion. Certain satellites can pick it up, but only very, very faintly. The signal is far too weak for them to get a sharp focus on it.” She touched the yellow rectangle on the map again. “What you’re seeing there is the computer’s best guess about where the target is. When we get on the ground in D.C. I can get the signal directly with my phone. That’ll narrow it down to a building. Even a specific part of a building once we’re close enough.”
    Travis recalled the mindset he’d adopted during his short time in Border Town. The logical flexibility that was such a necessary part of life there, like the native tongue of a foreign land. He found it coming back to him now. Radioisotopes in the water. Christ.
    “I guess that’s another trust thing,” he said.
    “The iodine? Sure. It’s a precaution in case someone tries to leave Border Town with an entity, unauthorized. Other than me, the only people who know about it are inside that rectangle in D.C. right now.”
    “No offense,” Travis said, “obviously Paige trusts you in a jam, but why would she have told you about the iodine before last night?”
    “I’m sure she trusts me as much as any of the other new blood—maybe an inch more, since she recruited me herself—but she didn’t tell me about the iodine. I told her.”
    Travis waited.
    “It was Paige’s idea to implement the technology,” Bethany said. “But only after I told her how it works.”
    “I take it you didn’t work at a petting zoo before she recruited you.”
    Bethany managed a smile. “Not exactly.” She looked down at